The surviving polychromy of a second century Roman marble sculpture at the British Museum (BM SC 1597), also known as the Treu Head, was investigated scientifically and rigorously compared to other Greek and Roman works of art. The analysis showed very close similarities between the paint layers of the Treu Head and those of contemporaneous, highly naturalistic mummy portraits from Egypt.
The extremely limited extent of surviving paint on the head and the highly sophisticated painting technique make the reconstruction of the original polychromy a task fraught with difficulties. With the intentional aim of excluding a modern reinterpretation of ancient painting techniques, the colour reconstruction proposed here was created by digitally ‘transplanting’ images of face parts from original Roman mummy portraits onto the Treu Head. The digital transplant involved reshaping the different facial features of the mummy portraits to those of the Treu Head. The novelty of this colour reconstruction lies not only on the thorough scientific reliability of the data, but also on the use of only Roman painted objects.
The final appearance of the head is therefore not intended as a definitive reconstruction of the ‘original’ appearance, but as a ‘possible’ appearance.